Monthly Archives: June 2015

Dear Friends,

Please forgive me for any spelling or grammar errors below, it has been a very long two days, and I thought it would be better to publish this as soon as possible rather than wait till it was perfect.

Continue reading →

Hello All! Yesterday, Friday, June 26, we harvested the first crop of the season from the Al’s garden! Today we delivered the lettuce, kale, and swiss chard to Our Lady of Sorrows Food Pantry. Thanks to efforts of the preschool watering  the garden every day and the Sunday School’s wonderful planting abilities,  the garden is off to a great start. The boston lettuce are almost ready and tomatoes are big and…. green. The green beans and cucumber are sprouting fast from seeds and we hope they will grow big and be plentiful this year. If you have any plants you think the garden would benefit from and want to give them to us, we would be happy to take them and plant them with the kids. Please, no tomatoes! Thank you all for the support and have a good summer!

Phoebe Holt-Reiss

Reverend Sheelagh’s Thought for the Week: June 24, 2015 

It’s been a week of mixed emotions. One of the seminal moments for me was listening to family members offer forgiveness to a young man motivated by hatred. This is an opportunity to risk something big for something good. Can we as a nation accept that there is much to do, and the next chapter in race relations needs to begin? Will we? Can we? Seize the moment to listen to to the silence in the eye of the storm? Read psalm 130, this Sunday’s psalm. The psalmist catches the human struggle well.

Continue reading →

Reverend Sheelagh’s Thought for the Week: June 10, 2015

The parable of the mustard seed always comes at a time when the weeds and bird gifts start to spring up in my garden; and I am always amazed how robust they are, and how quickly they take over. Jesus speaks to his followers in these little vignettes because living off the land and sea, most people understood them. The mustard tree is a crop tree, it has a purpose in middle eastern cuisine, unlike my weeds. Not only is it nutritious but it provides shelter for wildlife. The story today is that everything and everyone has a purpose, and that purpose is to support the creative love of God. And yes, that includes you. What are the gifts you are blessed with to make your contribution to this life? The marvel is, that all we are, as with the mustard tree, comes from a tiny microscopic speck of DNA. Think on the wonder of that!

Continue reading →

Reverend Sheelagh’s Thought for the Week: June 3, 2015

In many ways this is my favorite time of year.  The incredible events of Christmas, Easter and Pentecost are over, and we enter a period of what we call “ordinary” time.  Ordinary time will stretch from Pentecost until Advent – it is marked with the color green.  It is a time that allows us to take a breath and slow down and live into an easier rhythm.  It is not healthy for us to live life in the fast lane all the time, and in a small parish with a big heart that’s often what we do. We have our drumming camp coming up in July, but other than that, we settle into an easier period of parish life.  Yes, there are the graduations, the weddings, celebrations and the better weather to look forward to. So let’s breathe a deep breath, and take a look back at what we have achieved this year.  Ready?  Since labor day, we served at Christine’s Kitchen three times, St John’s three times, hosted IHN for a full week, had a successful Auction fundraiser, supported the Broadway Benefit performance, took the drummers to the Diocesan Convention, held a slew of meetings, had a Vestry Retreat, fixed the roof of the mausoleum (twice), replaced locks and light switches with timers, repaired a leaking water main, fixed some water damaged carpet, repaired the  elevator at the Mausoleum.  We had furnace issues in the rectory, ants in the preschool, and we shoveled and cleared record snowfall.  We had two weddings, two funerals.  All these things are also ordinary, but what this parish does, with so few of us, is quite extraordinary!

Continue reading →